If you want to know why Steven Soderbergh tapped Marvin Hamlisch to write the zany score for “The Informant!,” a deadly serious comedy about corporate malfeasance, consider the title’s exclamation point. Like that unexpected mark of exuberance, which hints at fun times (yippee!), the brassy horns and racing piano notes of the neo-slapstick score — think of “Laugh-In,” “Bananas” and Benny Hill — initially suggest that Mr. Soderbergh has put on his party hat and broken out the kazoo. Except that he isn’t laughing, or at least not all the way through. The story he tells is too maddening for sustained mirth, so he kills the jokes, with a vengeance.

Notably, there’s no punctuation mark in the title of Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant: A True Story,” though there might as well be. A real-life whodunit and why, it recounts the strange tale of Mark Whitacre, a biochemist and executive who, starting in the early 1990s, supplied the Federal Bureau of Investigation with hundreds of tapes that implicated his firm, Archer Daniels Midland, in a global price-fixing scheme. Known as the supermarket to the world, A.D.M. manufactures, among many other products, the kinds of ingredients that invariably show up in tiny print on the labels of almost everything we eat, mystery matter like lecithin, sorbitol and xanthan gum. It also produces lysine, an amino acid given to feedlot cattle and other livestock.

Lysine proved to be the downfall of A.D.M., or rather its very costly mistake, though that’s getting ahead of the secrets and lies of this movie, which opens with Mark (Matt Damon) waxing philosophical about corn. Over a series of elegant, uncluttered, precisely framed, softly lighted images that are representative of the movie’s visual design, he expounds on the remarkable diversity of corn, the wonder starch. It’s amazing stuff, all righty, he explains in his characteristic intimate voice-over, the words rushing and gushing, unwinding in unbroken if sometimes tangled threads. You then see him talking up corn to one of his sons, first over a meal and then in a red Porsche zipping down the road, an image Mr. Soderbergh briefly flips upside down.

This shot, while it might be mistaken for a filmmaker’s fillip, introduces the topsy-turvy world Mark enters as soon as he steps into the office, where he strides through the sterile headquarters accompanied by his own jaunty theme music. Gently plumped, with a mouth-breather’s slack smile, he looks like an overgrown baby and is, if a generously paid one. A biochemist and the company’s youngest vice president, he earns a salary hefty enough to stuff a garage with sports cars and cram a large house with all the ugly knickknacks and furniture money can buy. He’s living high on the hog making supplements for hogs. When he stands on his manicured lawn seemingly deep in thought, he looks every overfed inch like the American dream.

It’s the cost of that dream that Mr. Soderbergh takes stock of in this smart, cynical movie about how we buy now — oops, I mean, how we live now. Money makes the world go ’round in “The Informant!,” much as it does everywhere and much as it most certainly does in his previous movie, “The Girlfriend Experience,” about a young prostitute selling her waxed wares. This time, though, Mr. Soderbergh has trained his focus and expertly wielded digital camera on the other side of the buy-and-sell equation, on the men in suits who fly in corporate planes, nursing drinks while they chortle about the breasts of their female employees. These are masters of our universe, the big little men who control and distort world markets.

Mr. Whitacre rose swiftly through their ranks until he took a detour into the wilderness. The extreme nature of that turn isn’t immediately evident in the movie, a masterwork of narrative compression that the screenwriter Scott Z. Burns distilled from the book’s some 600 detailed pages. (Mr. Eichenwald covered the story for The New York Times.) You’ll never miss a thing. Like Mr. Soderbergh, Mr. Burns (“The Bourne Ultimatum”) doesn’t appear to have much use for narrative fat. And so they rapidly move Mark into position and just as quickly bring in the F.B.I. agents, Shephard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale), who, after wiring up Mark’s body and briefcase, become so touchingly protective of him that they carry around a photo of his family.

In time the agents sour on their cooperating witness, a grudging metamorphosis that parallels your own. Mr. Damon’s inherent likeability makes him something of a Trojan horse here, not only because he’s a star (and therefore beloved by definition), but also because he’s so boyish no matter the part. That’s true even in “The Informant!,” though he’s been gleefully uglied up for the role with a fake bulbous nose and real pudge. Mr. Damon’s physical choices tell you a lot about the character long before the truth seeps out. As does Mark’s tendency to drift into banalities in the voice-over — he natters on about ties, polar bears and butterflies while the scandal unfolds — a brilliant screenwriting device that hints at an inner duality.

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Something was surely off about Mark, though he and even A.D.M. were really symptoms of a greater disease — greed, corruption, name your capitalist vice — that was eating away at the country, until it popped bubbles, forced millions out of work and plunged the United States into the economic abyss. In films like “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic” Mr. Soderbergh has so successfully sexed up the social-issue picture, casting stars as crusading cops and bodacious do-gooders, that it’s been easy to diminish or simply ignore the passion of his commitment. That passion has been more overt in his last two efforts, “The Girlfriend Experience” and “Che,” his epic account of the revolutions won and lost by Che Guevara. In this movie it rages.

For all the silly walks and comic cameos, anger fuels “The Informant!,” giving it its pulse and reason for being. Anger inspires its giggles, forces its tears and might even explain the fiery orange that colors so many faces, as if this world and its people were on the verge of immolation. Like all of Mr. Soderbergh’s movies, this one can be appreciated on purely formal terms, for the clarity of its images and the economy of the storytelling. But it is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling. In the face of such corruption perhaps only laughter will do: after all, for a while now the joke has most definitely been on us.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the book by Kurt Eichenwald; edited by Stephen Mirrione; music by Marvin Hamlisch; production designer, Doug Meerdink; produced by Gregory Jacobs, Jennifer Fox, Michael Jaffe, Howard Braunstein and Mr. Eichenwald; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.